The newest update to the Solaris Operating System (Solaris OS) makes it easier for new customers to migrate to the Solaris OS, while enabling existing customers to reap the power of Sun's continuing investment in innovations for Solaris without disrupting operations. The new version is Solaris 10 8/07.

Sun and Microsoft will work together to make Windows Server deploy easily on Sun x64 systems. Sun will become an OEM for Windows Server. Microsoft and Sun will also work together to test and validate the Windows platform on Sun x64 systems and storage. Microsoft and Sun will also build an Interoperability Center on Microsoft's Redmond campus.

Sun recently announced its new Eco Innovation Initiative to help customers improve economic and environmental efficiency. The site offers links to new Eco solutions, Eco tools and other products and services such as Sun Eco Ready Kits.

MPK20 is Sun's virtual office that offers half of Sun employees who work remotely a virtual 3D environment to work, share documents and meet with colleagues using natural voice communication. Find out how this virtual 3D environment actually works in providing Sun employees a real-world work environment.

What are the underlying dynamics that drive open source? Janice J. Heiss explores the answer to this question in a recent article that reflects on Sun Chief Open Source Officer Simon Phipps' presentation "Liberating Java; Free and Open Opportunity for the Future."

Documentation for chipsets is being added to a new Sun wiki site. The Sun Microelectronics division has been adding older documentation so members of the OpenBSD and FreeBSD communities can include support for features. The site is the FOSS Open Hardware Documentation page.

NetBeans IDE users now have a way to develop rich Ajax web features without the need for JavaScript, while staying compliant with Java EE standards: a dedicated plug-in to ICEfaces open source software.

Source code for Project Darkstar is now freely available for download and use under the GPLv2 license. Project Darkstar is the video game industry's first enterprise grade, high performance, fault tolerant and highly scalable server technology for online, multiplayer games.

Keeping up on what's new in the Solaris 10 Operating System (Solaris OS) can be a big job, so we are featuring "What's new in the Solaris 10 8/07 Release". This is from the docs.sun.com site and presents need-to-know information on this release that summarizes new features in this current release.

Sun Distinguished Engineer Brian Wong believes semantics is the answer to many of today's and tomorrow's storage issues. With high semantic storage, a storage system will not only be able to hold data, but will actually help system administrators by understanding the data that it is storing and share that data across platforms. Wong explains in an interview with Al Riske.

Learn how to use the NAS Anti-Virus Agent (NAS AVA) - a standard part of the Sun StorageTek 5000 NAS Appliance's operating system - and manage its capabilities within your environment in a Sun Docs article by Tim Thomas.

Five new downloads for the Sun StorageTek Enterprise Backup Software (EBS), Release 7.4 or later are now available for free from Sun. They include EBS 7.4 Modules for NME-5.1, NMSQL-5.1, Networker Module for Sybase, Networker Module for Informix and Networker Module SAP.

Each week, we determine which articles have been most frequently referenced by logged-in subscribers to provide you with a list of the most popular articles for the last 4 issues. The top 10 articles for last week, Vol 115 Issue 1, were:

To enhance the buying experience on your e-commerce website, integrate Google Checkout into your web applications. Google Checkout provides an easy, web-based console for merchants. It has a powerful REST and XML based API to enable merchants to integrate their backend systems for order processing. Now there is a new NetBeans module that provides a wizard-driven interface to integrate the Checkout SDK in any web project.

In the last of Robert Eckstein's three part article series focusing on JavaFX Script, he explains how JavaFX Script can be used in conjunction with NetBeans IDE 5.5.1 to communicate with a server across a network, using the Java API for XML Web Services (JAX-WS) 2.1.

Venu Gopal has been working on security features for Project Sailfin, which adds Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) Servlets technology extension to the Sun Java System Communication Application Server (Glassfish). He offers links to the latest functionalities under development in his blog.